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Czeslaw Milosz - Banquet Speech

Czeslaw Milosz' speech at the Nobel Banquet,
December 10, 1980

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies
and Gentlemen,

I accept this highest honor on behalf of all men and women for
whom I am not so much an individual as a voice, and someone who
belongs to them. They should be invoked here, and they come from
more than one country. First of all, I think of those who cherish
the Polish language and literature, wherever they live, in Poland
or abroad; I also think of my part of Europe, the nations
situated between Germany and Russia, the nations in whose future
of freedom and dignity I believe; and particularly my thoughts go
to a country where I was born, Lithuania. Moreover, since I have
lived a long time in exile, I may be legitimately claimed by all
those who had to leave their native villages and provinces
because of misery of persecution and to adapt themselves to new
ways of life; we are millions all over the Earth, for this is a
century of exile. Neither should I bypass here my new home
country, America, where not only I found, as many before me,
hospitality and well-rewarded work, but also the friendship of
American poets. And though the University of California, where
for twenty years I have been teaching Slavic Literatures, counts
among its professors several Nobel Prize winners in science,
today it is particularly pleased being able to add to their
number its first Nobel laureate in humanities.

There is a paradox inherent in the poet's
calling. Savagely individualistic, pursuing goals which are
visible only to his few intimate friends, he grows accustomed to
be branded as difficult and obscure, only to discover one day
that his poems constitute a link between people and that he must
assume, whether he wants it or not, a symbolic role. Living a
long time abroad, I gradually became a poet of the young
generations in Poland, and, as I guess, my adventure has some
auspicious features of a general import. Poets and their readers
may be separated by distance but if a spiritual unity between
them is preserved, borders and barriers, thatever their nature,
have not power. I think that we, both in Poland and outside,
accomplished an important thing by refusing to recognize a
division of Polish literature into two separate bodies, depending
on where a given writer lives. Credit should here be given to
those of my colleagues who have not been swayed by absurd
doctrines, and to the young who have promoted free exchange of
ideas, whether through lectures, periodicals or books. Volumes of
my poetry published by their independent presses are most
precious items on my bookshelves. No lesser homage is due to the
astonishing energy and perseverance of a few persons who founded
abroad institutions dedicated to publishing books and periodicals
in Polish, such as the Literary Institute in France, that has
been active without interruption since the end of the war and has
been engaged in issuing books both of authors in exile and of
those from Poland. Such a continuity and unity of a culture,
maintained in most unfavorable circumstances, speaks against
romantic moods of irrevocability and nostalgia, attached by the
nineteenth century to the notion of exile.

I am a part of Polish literature which is
relatively little known in the world as it is hardly
translatable. Comparing it with other literatures, I have been
able to appreciate its rich oddity. It is a kind of a secret
brotherhood with its own rites of communion with the dead, where
weeping and laughter, pathos and irony coexist on an equal
footing, history-oriented, always allusive, in this century, as
before, it faithfully accompanied the people in their hard
trials. Lines of Polish verse circulated underground, were
written in barracks of concentration camps and in soldiers' tents
in Asia, Africa, and Europe. To represent here such a literature
is to feel humble before testimonies of love and heroic
selfsacrifice left by those who are no more. It is my hope that
the distinction kindly granted to me by the Swedish Academy
indirectly rewards all who guided my hand and whose invisible
presence sustained me in difficult moments.